Site Ed. Note: "A Statesman Proposes" points up how absurd racist Southern Senators could become. The back to Africa movement was not new, of course, having been considered during the Civil War by Lincoln, having been favored by black separatist Marcus Garvey in the latter Teens and early Twenties, gaining in that period substantial support among millions of African-Americans, until Mr. Garvey lost favor in 1925 upon being convicted for mail fraud. But it was one thing to make such a proposal for slaves to try to effect an end to the Civil War, quite another to suggest voluntary removal for cultural rejuvenation, and still yet another for a notorious race-baiter as Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi to propose such a plan for purely racist motives, supposedly to alleviate the shortage of jobs and create vacancies for white people.

The rest of the page is here. Query: Do wolf-boys like peaches?

Despite Uncle Danny Roper and his throttling machine, the Little Business Men at Washington yesterday got out a series of demands which seem pretty well to indicate what they want. That is:

This could easily have come from the National Association of Manufacturers or the Liberty League or any one of the Du Ponts or the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. In fact, the recommendations of Little Business are, except in one particular, almost exactly the recommendations that Big Business has put forward time and again. The exception is that Little Business dares to be considerably more vehement in phrasing and presenting them.

Zeb Vance Turlington, author of the bone-dry act which bears his name, is too late. If his intentions in announcing for the Legislature are, as we assume they are, to dam the flood of legal liquor which already has inundated 28 of North Carolina's 100 counties, he missed the real opportunity to repeat that heroic performance of the Dutch lad who stuck his finger in a hole in the dyke and held it there. For the hole in North Carolina's dyke first appeared in 1933, and the trickle that came through it smelled suspiciously like beer, though it wasn't. It was only Three-Point-Two.

But with each successive Legislature, North Carolina liquor laws have partly caught up with North Carolina drinking habits. It is now lawful in more than a fourth of the counties of the State to buy the same brands of liquor that the rest of it consumes sans legality and sans revenue. That many more of the dry counties are going to take advantage of the Legislature's permission to establish liquor stores, is open to doubt; but that any of the wet counties would submit to closing them is even more dubious, as we think Mr. Turlington will soon find out.

Georgia's Senate yesterday overrode an unfavorable committee report on a bill to appropriate $20,000 to Dr. Charles H. Herty's experimental laboratory in Savannah, and agreed by a vote which indicated sure passage for the bill to take it up today. The House has already passed it.

This money, if the appropriation goes through, will be the best that Georgia has ever spent. Dr. Herty's discoveries in the conversion of pine into paper have led already to the investment of thirty or forty millions in Southern craft paper plants. The immense potentialities of pine newsprint have not been tapped yet, except by the construction of one small mill in Texas, but they are there, and one of these days...

Furthermore, Dr. Herty has perfected a process to make newsprint and other paper out of black gum, and believes that in doing so he has opened up "a vast new field of research," which means to the South the addition of "forty per cent more in the already vast resources for the manufacture of paper, particularly newsprint."

To have discontinued this work, which has every prospect of rejuvenating the economy of a whole section of the country, for the lack of $20,000, would have been calamitous. Only, we can understand why Georgia should balk at putting up the major part of the money for further experiments which will benefit the South as a whole.

Nobody with the most elementary acquaintance with facts of economics will need to be told, of course, that the hoary old proposal which Theodore The Man resurrects would not do the thing he claims. On the contrary, it would leave us with a terribly busted economy.

But it is curious to observe how The Man surpasses our own unfavorite Senator, Robert Rice Reynolds, when it comes to concocting, for political purposes, alleged schemes for the solving of unemployment. Robert Rice, of course, only wants to round up the aliens among us and herd them back to the country of their origin, regardless of what, including starvation and shooting, may happen to them there. But The Man--The Man wants to pick up 12,000,000 citizens of these States, born here, bred here, and, like their fathers for generations, knowing no other country than this, and drop them down, presumably, into a tropical jungle, where they'd have exactly the same chance of survival they'd have if deposited on the moon. Co-loss-al! But why doesn't The Man propose to shoot them, simply and decently, in the first place?

The Dutch, who had hoped for a male heir to the line of Orange, are nevertheless not too disappointed, according to the dispatches, that Princess Juliana has borne a daughter instead.

They have no reason to be. For Holland, ruled by the old Queen Mother Emma and the reigning Queen Wilhelmina since 1901, has been one of the happiest of all countries in this century. Its position, indeed, is really amazing. Geographically, it is naturally a part of Germany. Moreover, it lies on the North Sea, with its great port of Rotterdam. And Germany has long yearned to have a great port on the North Sea. Further still, and in addition to being enormously rich at home, it owns, in the Dutch East Indies, one of the richest prizes in the Orient. Yet, it has been so resolute in its bearing that not even Hitler has ever talked seriously of grabbing it, that it managed to stay neutral in the World War, and that, without any considerable navy, it has held on to its colonial riches in a world of robber nations.

Internally, too, it is singularly well-off. The depression struck it lightly, and to this day it is on the gold standard. Its bonds are quoted as high as the best in the world. With many great industrial cities, it has no unemployment problem. And if it has any communist or fascist elements, they are small and unimportant.

That was a curious argument which took place at a regional conference on social hygiene in New York. Up rose a politician, New York State Senator Thomas C. Desmond, to say that "the pre-marital medical examination will not wipe out syphilis, but it is a long step in the right direction."

Whereupon, up got Dr. Louise Pearce, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, no less, to denounce the notion of a compulsory pre-marital examination. Said she:

That's a strange contention from a medical person--and a woman medical person at that. To be sure, society has no business ordering people about "even for their own good." But certainly it would seem to have the right to order them about for the good of the unborn. And it certainly would seem to have the right to take steps against having an intolerable load of incompetents and criminals cast upon it to support.

For once, a politician seems to be thinking straighter than a scientist.

A trouble zone in the relations of the United States and Japan, growing constantly more strained in China, is the salmon fishing waters off Alaska. Title to these fishing grounds passed from Russia to this country when the territory was purchased, but the Federal Government has never formally outlined its exact claims. Meantime, however, the salmon industry has grown so that the annual catch totals up to $42,000,000.

For many years Japan has been trespassing on the grounds. But recently, according to testimony before the House Committee on Fisheries and the Merchant Marine, she has taken to fishing on a scale to cause the greatest alarm to the American fishing fleet. Worse, she has been netting the salmon on their way to the rivers to spawn, with the result that complete destruction of the industry within five years is prophesied. Thousands of American workers, too, have been thrown out of work, and feeling among these and the owners of the fishing boats runs very high. One of the latter, indeed, did not hesitate to tell the committee the other day that unless the Government takes speedy steps to protect the waters, the American workmen will probably take things into their own hands and destroy the Japanese nets, with a chance that there will be gunfire in the process.